


Patronage

by scioscribe



Category: A Little Lily Princess (Visual Novel)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-27
Updated: 2017-09-27
Packaged: 2019-01-05 22:43:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,817
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12198879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: Jessie runs away to the ballet after all, until the right admirer comes for her.





	Patronage

**Author's Note:**

> All background info on ballet stolen from [this article](https://australianballet.com.au/behind-ballet/when-ballet-was-really-tough).

The ballet was much as Miss Minchin had said it would be. Of course, Jessie thought, too numb by then to feel anything but the very dullest surprise; of course she would have fumbled learning even that lesson. It no longer mattered. She had no virtues apart from agile feet, strong legs, a narrow waist, and enough candy-box French to understand the names of the movements she was required to learn. Very early on, she cut her hair and sold it, but red hair, even so much of it, brought very little. She had to work.

She lied about her age. No one, from the theater manager to the other girls, thought she looked sixteen, but most of them took her for at least fourteen.

“Anyway you’ll look older right quick,” a girl told her. Her name was Helen, but she went by Hel, because she said she was sure that was her destination: she had a braying laugh that would never have been permitted at Miss Minchin’s and an atrocious accent, but also gorgeous golden-brown eyes like toffee. She was Jessie’s first friend in the company and she taught her all kinds of things. How to massage her sore feet with pilfered liniment, how to avoid kicking her skirts into one of the lamps, how to dodge a man with a certain look in his eyes, how to stitch her costumes even when her fingers were numb from the cold, how to drink.

Jessie was drunk when she kissed Hel, but not so drunk that she didn’t notice Hel was only allowing it, patiently, rather than kissing her back.

She pulled away, an awful misery in her stomach that she couldn’t pretend was only from the cheap, sweet wine. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.”

Hel patted her on the shoulder. “Of course you meant to. Poor little Jess. I’ve seen the way you never even have one single favorite in all those men what have got their eyes on you. You’ll find somebody nice.”

As she always did, drunk or sober, she thought of Lavinia. Nice had never been the word.

The first girl she truly kissed, the first one who truly kissed her back, was no nicer than Lavvie had been, and she had the same black hair, long and prone to crackling like lightning when it was brushed in the cold. Jessie brushed her hair because Jessie did everything for her, everything she was allowed. She was repaid with careless kisses and two days’ wages gone when the girl departed without warning at the end of a show.

So the ballet was a lesson in being hungry in more ways than one. Not that she didn’t already know how to starve in that particular way. She hardly knew what love felt like, separate from a stomachache.

By then, she was calling herself Jessie Abbott again. There was no one now who would look for her, and no one who would choose to find her as she was. Nineteen, with a dusty net of false opal beads in her hair to hide what she could of the red, with a permanent place in what there was of their little company. Her feet callused and split, her knees always stiff. She had a few minor burns—she had been saved from worse by her lack of prominence, by managers getting one look at that carroty shock and saying she should stay well to the rear. She slept in a single room with four other girls.

But—and this was what Miss Minchin would never have understood—she owed no one anything. When flowers were sent to her at the end of a show, as they sometimes were, she declined them and hid in the back dressing room until even the most persistent gentlemen gave up. She paid her own rent and mended her own stockings. When she worked so hard to please, it was out of love and not out of need. She was always needy, sometimes felt like she was nothing but a canyon of endless want, but she had learned to tolerate the emptiness at her own center.

When she had sat at the feet of the girl who was not Lavinia, and put her head on her knees, she had done it because she had liked to do it. She had not hoped for money.

Even beggars, Jessie thought sometimes, smiling, could have their principles. If not quite their choices.

She adjusted the net on her hair—so close-cropped now, almost elfin, like some pathetic imitation of Sara Crewe’s, would she never get over her schooldays? Clearly not, even in the midst of praising herself for how far she had come—and stepped out onto the stage.

The lights, as always, were in her eyes, but she did not need to see the audience, only the other dancers.

Something was in her blood that night, making her feel strong even though she’d had only a scrap of bread for breakfast and nothing else since. The lightheadedness made more sense, but should have impeded her, made her clumsy, and it did not. She was more graceful than ever. She leapt like a flame, like she was the one who would burn down the stage, burn down the theater. Like she was so dangerous other girls had best keep away.

When the ballet was done, someone shoved her forward. “Go on, Jessie, it was your show.”

The generosity of them could stagger her sometimes—they would either cut each other with letter openers over unpaid debts or spend all night knitting each other tattered shawls.

Jessie, feeling silly now that the rush of the dance was done, walked as lightly as she could up to the front of the stage and curtsied for the crowd, resigning herself to a long night spent hiding herself away in the icebox of a dressing room. For they loved her tonight, those gentlemen who would call her a slut and pinch her thighs and arms and breasts if she were any closer. On stage, she was a butterfly, an angel, a temptation; on the ground, she was no better than she ought to be.

“Come on, girls,” Maddie, the usual prima ballerina, said huffily, once they were all safely behind the curtain. She, needless to say, had not been the one pushing Jessie to her own round of applause. “Let’s all begin the job of weeding through our little ice queen Jessie’s suitors that she’s too high-and-mighty to take.”

“You should thank me, shouldn’t you?” Jessie said. “Otherwise you would have to find them all on your own and if they hadn’t just been disappointed, they might mind a little more how thick your legs have gotten.”

“Jessie isn’t frigid anyhow,” another girl put in. “She just has _peculiar_ tastes.”

“Is that true, Jessie? Are you _peculiar_?”

“Among all of you, I’m peculiar for having taste at all.” She did not, in truth, mean to wound: they all scratched at each other in a form of play, the way Tybalt had chased after yarn. They knew her tastes by now.

Would she have been better off as a girl if she could have seen Lavinia’s little cruelties as harmless bouts of fencing, or was she worse off now for thinking it was simply how one talked, to look to wound by pinpricks? No, she decided, it did not matter, not really. It had mattered with Lavinia because everything had mattered back then, when her fate was undecided, but now everything was fixed. Now at last, no longer a child, she could afford to play the games of unkind children.

As if to underline Jessie’s point, Maddie tugged at the netting on Jessie’s hair as she passed and snapped it.

“Oh, damn you,” Jessie said, rolling her eyes and kneeling down to pick up the beads that had scattered. “No, go on, please go steal my admirers. Your legs look especially sturdy from this angle.”

“That’s why I can do leaps you can’t,” Maddie said, unruffled, and departed with one of them: such a show-off.

Her fingers had just closed around a glittering black bead when a patent leather boot settled down by her hand. Jessie, never tired of identifying beauty even when she could afford it less than ever, immediately noted its quality and its suppleness, the richness of its dye. It was a lady’s foot, and no dancer wore such shoes. No patron would ever have paid so much for anything besides jewels or a house; patrons lacked imagination.

Jessie turned up her head.

It was Lavinia.

Some part of her was not surprised—could never have been surprised. Hadn’t she always expected to find herself at Lavinia’s feet?

Not in tattered stockings, with blood in one slipper, with her hair almost boyishly short, with her dress so low-cut in the bust that it went down below her collarbone. She rose up hastily.

Lavinia looked as if Jessie were a ghost. She said, “You’ve grown so thin,” and her voice was faltering. She reached out and touched Jessie’s cheek, like Jessie was still her very own, a doll to be caressed at her whim.

“Willowy,” Jessie said. She sounded no better. “Dancers are willowy.”

“I suppose. I can’t say I go around scrutinizing trees to see if it might be poetic to compare someone to one.”

“That would have been Sara.”

Lavinia smiled an extraordinarily bitter smile. “And do you know what became of the Princess Sara? Her pumpkin turned back into a coach and four, or, goodness me, maybe even a coach and eight. The diamond mines sprouted up again like flowers after rain, if we’re going to be so very insistent on evoking horticulture.”

It all felt a thousand miles away. Perhaps it was, even—perhaps Sara was. “I’m glad for her.”

“Well, I hope you can see now that she didn’t come find you,” Lavinia said. “ _I_ did.” And with nothing else said, she threw her arms around Jessie and hugged her tightly, crushing Jessie up against all her ribbons and satin like it didn’t matter at all that Jessie was sweat-soaked and trembling with exhaustion, that she was poor and Lavinia had once looked on that as something that could be caught by someone breathing on her. “And I didn’t stay away only to teach you a lesson either, you stupid, stupid girl, I looked and looked for you. And your parents told me you’d been carried off by a fever!”

That should not have surprised her, but it still felt like a slap. If, that was, a slap could carry nostalgia with it. Oh, Lavvie, still not knowing how to be kind.

“You didn’t believe them?”

“Of course not,” Lavinia said haughtily, but she didn’t say why. She only stood there looking at her and then, very cautiously, reached out and touched Jessie’s arm, not with the same proprietary firmness of her earlier caress, but as if she thought Jessie might melt away. Here she was on the ground and yet, to someone, still a butterfly, one who could barely be touched in case it wilted her wings. “You’re so thin.”

“You said that.”

“Well, you haven’t said anything about _me_! Not even one thing twice!”

Jessie’s throat hurt. “You look lovely, Lavvie. As lovely as ever. But you shouldn’t be in a place like this.”

“And why not, when you are?”

“I,” Jessie said, with a touch of ironic grandiosity, “am ruined.”

“Perhaps I am ruined too. You would certainly not know it if I were, as little as you seem to care that I’m here.”

She folded her arms about herself. “You could never be ruined. You’re like the diamond mines, you would always come back again, too hard and too glittering to ever be lost.”

“Hard? _I_ am hard? You _left_ me, Jessie Abbott! You begged me for ‘forever’ and then you _left_ , without a word, without a promise, without a kiss, without anything at all! Could you ever have loved me at all?”

Jessie bore this grandiloquence with patience. There was something behind it—with Lavinia there usually was, as much as she tried to pretend there wasn’t—but for the most part, it was a front, an evocation of emotion as gorgeous and flat as the backdrop on the stage. It would have been funny if they had run away together after all, her to dance and Lavinia to act. Though she was a better dancer than Lavinia was an actress.

“Heartless,” Lavinia pronounced her.

“Oh, Lavvie, you know I adored you.” If she said it easily, it cheapened it; made a joke out of it. “I would have done anything for you. Dried your shoes with my hair when you came in out of the rain.”

“Why in heaven’s name would I or anyone else want that?”

“It’s only a figure of speech, Lavinia!”

“I was a child!” And now, at last, they were behind the backdrop. Lavinia no longer looked beautiful: she looked hectic and distressed, genuinely angry, and absent any cleverness of expression. “I’d never had someone look at me like you did. I never knew what to do with you—what did one do with a girl who was an admirer? And you wanted so much. We can’t all grow up at twelve, can we? I wanted to be _perfect_ and you—everything you wanted would have ruined me!”

It was true—they had been so young. And they had been trained to think of different futures. She had simply not been convincing enough to make Lavinia prefer hers.

“It doesn’t matter,” Jessie said. “It was all so long ago.”

Lavinia’s mouth trembled, just slightly. “You don’t mean that. Jessie?”

Jessie felt almost too exhausted to stand up straight. Was she expected to dole out truth alongside consolation? _No one else will ever hurt me as badly as you did, and I will never love anyone else so much, yes, it matters, yes, I think of you constantly, it is dreadful how I chase after girls with your hair, it is foolish and unbearable that some part of me is still waiting for you in the schoolroom._

She said, “You’re not wearing your wedding ring. This is a dangerous place to leave it off—men will think it their right to look at you.”

Lavinia said, “But I never put one on, so that when I found you, you would know I wanted to be looked at.”

Jessie couldn’t help the knot inside her unraveling, rapidly, and making her cry. “It’s too late, Lavvie. You see where I’ve been! This is my life, and it’s no place for you.”

“Well, I should think not. Obviously you’ll come with _me_.” Lavinia looked around and sniffed, and then sniffed again, until Jessie suspected she was using her disdain as cover for her own tears. “This place is very dreadful and, I will say again, you are entirely too thin. You look like a scullery maid. I have come to rescue you. You dance very beautifully, by the way, though you always did, and you always did it better with a partner.”

Jessie listened to the sound of her own breathing in the silence, like she needed to memorize the moment. “That’s so.”

“Then it’s settled.”

“You don’t even know me anymore,” Jessie said.

“Don’t be stupid, of course I know you. I’ll always know you. And what I don’t know, you can tell me. I’m sure it’s interesting, horrid things always are.”

She couldn’t help laughing. “Have you thought that I might like all this?”

“No,” Lavinia said frankly, “because you always had the very best of taste.”

“You say that only because you know I like _you_.”

Lavinia noticed the tense of her verb and smiled a victorious smile—she was completely devoted to her victory, then. Maybe they did still know each other, after all.

In the end, she left a note, and all of her pocket-money. The money would vanish at once, but the note, she hoped, would be passed around to the other girls.

_Cold Jessie has at last been thawed by gorgeous, wealthy patron, or is patroness? Do try not to destroy yourselves with envy._

“That is not much of a goodbye,” Lavinia said, looking it over. “Though the description of me is apt.”

“I believe they will understand that I don’t mean the parts of it that I don’t mean.”

“Gracious,” Lavinia said. “We _have_ grown complex, haven’t we?” She took Jessie’s hand in hers. “Will you dance for me tonight?”

“No.” She said it heartlessly, enjoying the feeling of toying with Lavinia for once. “I’m too tired.”

“Tomorrow, then,” Lavinia said crisply, squeezing her hand and not letting go of it. That seemed all the concession she was capable of granting, but Jessie supposed it would be enough.


End file.
